My contact with Dean was limited to the early days of Textpattern, which this site used to be built on. I LOVED Textpattern, but it just developed too slowly and I had to move on to other CMSs. In fact, the latest blog post on textpattern.com is about how they finally have theme support, in 2018! Anyways, because of my love of Textpattern I jumped on the chance to become one of the initial investors of Textdrive, which went on to become Joyent. That lead me to learn about FreeBSD and Solaris and OpenIndiana and gave me another pillar to build my career on.